Free Republic

SEATTLE — A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Horace Anderson and the estate of his deceased son, Lorenzo Anderson, a 19-year-old who was shot near the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone. The lawsuit holds Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, City Council Member Kshama Sawant and the City of Seattle responsible for the death. CHOP was a seven-block, police-free protest zone that the mayor, City Council and other government entities allowed during the George Floyd protests. Lorenzo Anderson was shot in the early morning hours of June 20, 2020, on Pine Street, and Seattle medics refused to enter the CHOP...

The mayor of Seattle is calling on the city to rebuild its depleted police force after six separate shootings rocked Washington state's largest metropolitan area over the weekend. "As a city, we cannot continue on this current trajectory of losing police officers," Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said during a Monday press conference. "Over the past 17 months, the Seattle Police Department has lost 250 police officers which is the equivalent of over 300,000 service hours. We’re on path to losing 300 police officers." Durkan added that the weekend violence is a "reminder" that there are certain emergency situations that require...

SEATTLE - Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan will not seek re-election, prompting what will likely be significant political posturing for the position and a 2021 city campaign season like no other. “I've decided that I will not seek a second term,” Durkan told KING 5. “2020 has just been a brutal year, but we have some really tough months ahead of us. We still have to fight COVID, we've got to deliver a vaccine, and we're gonna have a really hard job of rebuilding our economy, our downtown and continuing all the work on equity. I could have spent the whole...

A unanimous Washington State Supreme Court tossed out the effort to recall Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, ruling that the accusations against her did not rise to the level that would allow a citizen initiative to remove her from office. The decision kills the push to recall the mayor and means that, barring unforeseen circumstances, voters in 2021 will have the final say on Durkan’s job performance, should she choose to run for a second term. “The allegations in this case are deeply troubling and our review requires that we treat the factual allegations as true,” the court wrote in a...

Washington’s Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously rejected a recall effort against Seattle Mayor Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan over her handling of widespread summer protests. The recall effort, led by six Seattle residents, blames the mayor for the Seattle Police Department’s indiscriminate use of tear gas during weeks of protests against racial injustice and police brutality sparked by the police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

SEATTLE mayor Jenny Durkan could reportedly face charges for failing to clear the "autonomous zone" set up by Black Lives Matter protesters in the city earlier this year. **SNIP** The area expanded, eventually taking up six blocks and a park, and remained in place for over three weeks before being cleared on July 1 by police following an emergency order from Mayor Durkan. Attorney general William Barr has now asked prosecutors in the civil rights division of the Justice Department to look into whether Durkan could be charged for failing to clear the area sooner, the New York Times reported....

The Department of Justice is looking into whether federal charges can be brought against Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan over her failure to crack down on a so-called “autonomous zone” controlled for weeks by rioters. Attorney General William Barr has tasked the DOJ’s civil rights division with investigating whether charges can be brought against Durkan, The New York Times reported on Wednesday evening citing two people familiar with the discussions. Barr has also asked federal prosecutors to consider charging rioters with sedition and insurrection against the United States government, according to The Wall Street Journal. Rioters took over several city blocks...

Seattle's top cop has said she quit her job last month after cuts to the budget left her 'destined to fail.' Carmen Best was the Seattle Police Department's first Black female police chief and officers lined the streets to bid her farewell Wednesday during her last day on the job. In an interview published the same day, Best - who previously said her decision to leave 'certainly isn't about the demonstrators' following the death of George Floyd – blasted the city council's decision to drop 100 officers out of 1,400. 'I believe 100% that they were putting me in a...

The push to recall Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is based on a policy disagreement, not a violation of any law or standard, and the petitioners leading the recall haven’t identified what steps Durkan should have taken in the wake of June’s widespread protests, Durkan argued in appealing her case to the state Supreme Court. Durkan’s argument, filed Monday, reprises some of the arguments she made in King County Superior Court, where a judge ruled that the recall effort could move forward, but also adds some new ones. “Following the most widespread civil unrest Seattle has seen in decades, Petitioners submitted,...

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, after vetoing Friday the revised 2020 budget approved last week by the City Council, called for new collaboration with council members, with whom she’s often been at odds. “The people of Seattle expect us to work together,” Durkan said during a Friday afternoon news conference, adding that she had spoken to Council President M. Lorena González on how to “make changes in a more thoughtful, deliberate way.” The council’s adjustments to the budget would have cut up to 100 police officers, slashed the salaries of police command staff and also scrapped the city’s Navigation Team, which...

Amazon is gauging how employees feel about moving away from the company's Seattle campus, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic and Seattle’s new payroll tax. Amazon sent an email to workers asking if they’d be willing to work in Seattle’s suburbs and outlying areas, including Redmond and Tacoma. The story was reported by Bloomberg on Friday. **SNIP** Amazon employs about 50,000 workers at its Seattle headquarters, which includes more than 40 buildings - including the company’s landmark, greenhouse-like glass Spheres - sprawling across several blocks. **SNIP** Amazon has had a rocky relationship with the Seattle City Council since at least...

SEATTLE - On Thursday, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant released a statement in response to Seattle police Chief Carmen Best’s retirement announcement Tuesday. **SNIP** “Best was never a reformer. This is clear in her failure to fight for serious policy changes in the department, her consistent refusal to hold officers accountable, and perhaps most of all in her choice to retire now rather than to carry out the reforms demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement." “Best’s actions were guided at all times by her loyalty to the status quo and willingness to carry out the role of the police...

The Seattle City Council voted with some compromise in an ongoing budget battle with Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan. It came a day after widespread criticism of the council for its handling of the police department budget, which was cited by Chief Carmen Best as a reason for her sudden resignation. Councilmember Andrew Lewis noted that there was a real friction between the council and mayor, and it was spilling into everything the elected leaders do. It was the precursor for a discussion over whether to overturn a mayoral veto on spending $86 million on city reserves. Durkan vetoed the legislation,...

Seattle City Councilmembers on Thursday shot back at criticism from city officials that their proposals to cut funding from the Seattle Police Department were "irresponsible" and "reckless." During a meeting Thursday, members of the council talked about their plans to slash funding to SPD in response to months of calls from thousands of residents to defund the department and reinvest in the community. The council's discussion came after a news conference earlier this week where Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best called the proposals "unattainable and unworkable." "It is unfortunate that we are faced with the reality that...

Days after antifa rioters terrorized Seattle, driving a van full of weapons and explosives with the mob in order to set fires and attempt to blow up police departments, Mayor Jenny Durkan focused her attention squarely on President Donald Trump, accusing him of running a “dress rehearsal for martial law.” She claimed that Trump’s efforts to bolster local law enforcement to combat a rising tide of crime and violence have “decreased public safety.” In a press conference addressing the antifa riots, Durkan claimed “the president wants” the violence. The riots on Saturday followed a protest in support of the antifa...

Seattle city councilmember Kshama Sawant decried “the brutality of capitalism” after a judge blocked the city’s ban on police crowd-control tools such as tear gas and pepper spray, declaring that the Friday ruling threatened “peaceful protesters.” “Rather than ensure that peaceful protestors are kept safe from federal agents, this court ruling reveals the brutality of American capitalism readying its full arsenal of weapons to attempt to violently suppress demonstrations,” said Ms. Sawant in a Saturday press release. **SNIP** Seattle has been billed as the first U.S. city to prohibit a wide array of crowd-control methods under the ordinance, which passed...

As a deadly pandemic resurges in Washington, city leaders in Seattle are preparing for a weekend of probable Portland-level conflict between newly arrived federal agents, the Seattle Police Department, and...let's call them.................groups of demonstrators using different strategies to protest police brutality and a capitalist, white supremacist, colonialist patriarchy that relies on state violence to sustain itself. **SNIP** Durkan asked the city to "stand together to denounce" a group of protesters who busted up and lit fires within businesses and public buildings last Sunday afternoon and Wednesday night. She said this "relatively small" group is "bent on destruction," and referenced social...

The mother of a 19-year-old Seattle man fatally shot last month in the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone filed a wrongful-death claim against the city of Seattle on Monday, alleging city officials created a dangerous environment by allowing protesters to occupy six city blocks and that police and fire officials failed to protect or medically assist her son. **SNIP** Sinclair Martin, a caseworker at Seattle’s People of Color Against AIDS Network, said her son helped out during yearly counts of people living outdoors and participated in a Rainier Beach youth program. He loved basketball and football, and was pursuing...

Mayor Jenny Durkan has asked a federal judge to prevent a new City Council ordinance banning Seattle police from using most “crowd-control weapons” from taking effect later this month, saying it likely conflicts with the consent decree the city entered into with the Department of Justice (DOJ) nearly eight years ago. Documents filed Friday in U.S. District Court by the city say that the Department of Justice and the court-appointed monitor overseeing implementation of the consent decree have said the new law can’t take effect without the approval of U.S. District Judge James Robart. Durkan and police Chief Carmen Best...

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan rebuffed the Seattle City Council this week, laying out her own plans to reduce the police budget by about 20% and calling the Council's plan for considerably larger cuts "irresponsible." So what does it all mean politically? We asked our Friday politics team Joni Balter, host of civic cocktail on the Seattle Channel, and C.R. Douglas, political analyst for Q 13 News. Paige Browning: Joni, what did you make of Durkan’s announcement? Joni Balter: I thought it made a lot of sense. You know, the mayor has to be the adult in the room, she has...